Surface Green’s function of a soft elastomer with the gravity effect

Gravity can play a tremendous effect on deformation of rubberlike materials and biological soft tissues. In this paper, considering the gravity effect, we proposed a surface Green’s function of a soft elastomer based on the neo-Hookean model. The proposed surface Green’s function is applied to analyze the elastic deformation of a soft elastomer subjected to uniform pressure. The surface normal displacement of the soft elastomer is calculated and the results show that gravity has a large impact on the surface deformation of the elastomer. Generally, the surface normal displacement decreases with the increasing gravitational force.